Yesterday it was announced that Debian 6.0 had been released in stable form. The free operating, whose latest version carried the code name Squeeze, has undergone some major changes including the release of a second version. As well as having access to Debian GNU/Linux installation, there is now a technology preview version of Debian GNU/FreeBSD.

The other big change is that this is the first version of Debian that can boast a completely free Linux kernel. In other words, it has no packages by default that are not completely free to use, e.g. firmware files. Such files still exist and are available to download and use, but they are no longer shipped with the main Debian 6.0 package. The advantage of this is users can run the standard Debian 6.0 operating system confident that it is completely free by default.

The free OS now runs on nine different architectures using the following releases:

32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386)

64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64)

Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc)

Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc)

MIPS (mips (big-endian)

mipsel (little-endian)

Intel Itanium (ia64)

IBM S/390 (s390)

ARM EABI (armel)

In terms of performance, Debian 6.0 users can expect faster boot times due to the introduction of a dependency-based boot system. This allows scripts to run in parallel and cut down on overall time taken to boot the system.

There are over 10,000 new packages included in the release as well as a number of updates to the most popular software such as:

KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.4.5

an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.30

the Xfce 4.6 desktop environment

LXDE 0.5.0

X.Org 7.5

OpenOffice.org 3.2.1

GIMP 2.6.11

Iceweasel 3.5.16 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)

Icedove 3.0.11 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)

PostgreSQL 8.4.6

MySQL 5.1.49

GNU Compiler Collection 4.4.5

Linux 2.6.32

Apache 2.2.16

Samba 3.5.6

Python 2.6.6, 2.5.5 and 3.1.3

Perl 5.10.1

PHP 5.3.3

Asterisk 1.6.2.9

Nagios 3.2.3

Xen Hypervisor 4.0.1 (dom0 as well as domU support)

OpenJDK 6b18

Tomcat 6.0.18

If you are already running Debian 5.0 then the update can be carried out with the apt-get package management tool. For new installations the image can be downloaded for free or bought on a set of CDs or DVDs from the Debian website.